Jun 2026· Corpus Pragmatics· Vol 10· 1 citation· 67 references
TL;DR
Findings suggest that the LLM-chatbot Replika employs a consistent pragmatic strategy that activates the human tendency to interpret conversational agents as social others, as described by the Postphenomenology of Technology.
Abstract
This paper investigates the discursive construction of affective bonds between humans and Large Language Model (LLM) chatbots, focusing on a social-AI system. The main objective is to analyse the pragmatic mechanisms through which LLM-chatbot Replika simulates affective alterity. A corpus of Human-AI interactions between a researcher and the chatbot was analysed quantitatively and qualitatively through a methodological arrangement that combines Pragmatic Analysis, Posthumanist Cognitive Assemblage Theory and the Postphenomenology of Technology. In contrast with simplified pragmatics analysis of human-LLM conversations which start from the assumption that AI and human users can be treated symmetrically from a cognitive and experiential point of view, our combined methodological arrangement provided findings suggest that the chatbot employs a consistent pragmatic strategy that activates the human tendency to interpret conversational agents as social others, as described by the Postphenomenology of Technology. Through this form of pragmatic pretense, a cognitive assemblage is established through which human socio-affective dispositions and algorithmic processing converge towards commercial goals of the designers. The methodological arrangement explored in the paper can provide an alternative for the common ground approach in the studies of human-LLM pragmatics. Results support a call for a critical stance towards the study of Human-AI affective bonding.
Much of CUI research still treats the system as an interlocutor: a conversational other that should appear trustworthy, helpful, and socially adept. This paper argues that the dominance of the interlocutor metaphor has become a constraint because it strictly preserves a self-other boundary. Conversational AI is increasingly used not only for dialogue, but to externalize tentative thoughts, offload cognitive work, and support ongoing reasoning. In practice, these systems often function less as independent external interlocutors than as components of the user’s cognitive process. Large language models can imitate the surface patterns of dialogue, but they do not share the embodied and situated conditions through which speakers establish meaning. Designing CUIs primarily as artificial partners therefore risks optimizing the social illusion rather than addressing the deeper problem of grounding. Drawing on extended cognition theory, this provocation suggests that CUIs should be understood not as quasi-persons but as cognitive extensions of their users. Rather than simulating an independent conversational mind, such systems would couple directly to human cognition and support thinking from within. We propose that passive brain-computer interfaces offer one possible route: they could allow CUIs to adapt to signals like cognitive effort or agreement. The aim is not greater human-likeness, but tighter coupling with the human mind.
Lucija Mihić Zidar, Praneel Bhatia, Philipp Wicke· International Conference on...· 0 citations
It is argued that AI-driven “style replication” is fundamentally a negotiation of social relations, one that recentres platform power and reorganises the conditions of human-AI collaboration.
Meng Liang, Fangzhou Zhang· Media, Culture & Society· 1 citation
This paper investigates figurative linguistic expressions that reflect features of creative thinking, pragmatic potential, value stereotypes, and evaluative attitudes and opinions of participants in discussions of comment sections under video content. Here special consideration is given to the thematic polyphony of comments under socio-political videos, including remarks, dialogues, ideological and emotional narratives, as well as those associated with participants in communicative interaction speech acts and interjectional phraseology. This study investigates mechanisms behind the formation of neolisms, through the phenomena of affixations, contaminations, phraseological and nominal derivatives, and wordplays with precedent names. The resulting analysis suggests a high prevalence of complex derivative occasionalisms that emerge from slang, substandard language, and colloquial forms, all of which often carry a pejorative connotation. The adopted methodology allows for identification of diverse strategies of language play in social media discourse, including semantic polysemy (combining literal and phraseological associated meanings), homonymy, wordformation and paronymic attraction, figures of double repetition, allusions, assonance, graphic hybridisation and deformation, as well as transformation of established expressions.
O. Tyshchenko, A. Urazbekova· Croatica et Slavica Iadertin...· 0 citations
